[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 16]
[House]
[Page 21351]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     PARITY WITH THE EUROPEAN UNION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, later this year, another round of World 
Trade Organization talks will be held. Those talks will be pivotal for 
the United States economy, especially for our agriculture sector. Of 
critical importance will be the role the European Union plays in these 
negotiations along with the United States.
  I would like to point out some things, Mr. Speaker, regarding our 
situation with the European Union. First of all, as far as the economy 
of both the United States and the European Union is concerned, they are 
fairly equal. We have an economy of $11.7 trillion, European Union is 
$9.4 trillion. And in spite of that equality, our tariffs are very 
different. Those commodities from the European Union coming into the 
United States are tariffed at 12 percent. Our commodities going into 
the European Union are tariffed at 30 percent. So it is more than 
double. It is hard to understand why with roughly equivalent economies, 
we have this disparity.
  The agriculture trade deficit, partly because of this and some other 
things I am going to discuss in a minute, for the United States last 
year was a minus $6.3 billion. The European Union obviously benefited 
to the tune of $6.3 billion in trade.
  Now, the interesting thing is that the European Union provides $3 
billion in export subsidies. The United States provides $31.5 million. 
These are subsidies that enhance the opportunity to trade with other 
countries. So that difference is 90 to 1. They spend 90 times more 
money to export subsidies than we do, and of course this apparently is 
allowed under WTO rules. This is one of the major complaints that other 
countries have about the whole trade situation internationally.
  Another issue that is of some interest to those of us in the United 
States is the fact that we subsidize our agriculture to the tune of $38 
per acre. By contrast, the European Union subsidizes their agriculture 
$295 per acre. Now, the reason this is important is that within the 
next year, we are going to start rewriting the farm bill and we will 
have tremendous pressure, particularly from the European Union, to do 
away with these subsidies here that amount to $38 an acre, even though 
they are providing $295 an acre.
  The reason for that is they are priding themselves on the fact that 
they have gone with what they call decoupled payments in the past year. 
This means their payment is not linked to production. It is simply a 
payment to the farmers. Our payments are largely linked to production. 
It will be interesting to see what impact this has on our farm bill 
because we may be forced to some degree to go away from some of our 
subsidies as we now provide them, even though they are much less than 
what the European Union provides.
  Another issue that is rather interesting is that the United States 
has had a total of two cases of BSE, or what is commonly referred to as 
``mad cow disease.'' In contrast, the European Union has 189,102 cases 
of BSE. Now the reason that is interesting is they have effectively 
eliminated our beef exports into the European Union even though we have 
demonstrated that we have probably the safest beef supply in the world.
  You say, how in the world can they do this? Last year in 2004, they 
had 756 cases of BSE where we had one this last year. And so the reason 
is that they simply have said, Well, you are using hormones with your 
beef and, therefore, it is unsafe. And, of course, the WTO has filed a 
suit against them and they are paying a fine, but it is just the cost 
of doing business.
  In addition to this, they are also disallowing our imports of pork, 
our imports of poultry and also genetically modified corn and 
genetically modified soybeans. So in every one of these cases, they 
have used various means and methods to keep our products out.
  So what we are seeing here is in this next round of talks, if the 
European Union is not brought around to the point where our farmers 
feel they are being fairly treated, we are going to have a hard time 
getting any kind of a trade agreement through this body.
  You often hear our farmers say, we like free trade, but we especially 
want fair trade. I would say right now the biggest obstacle to what 
appears to be fair trade within the WTO framework is our relationship 
with the European Union. So we certainly think that these things need 
to be pointed out. We would like to see those things addressed in the 
next round of talks.

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